Heather Hamilton

Frau Troffea Invents the Dancing Plague

            Strasbourg, 1518

They want to know
why I started it.

Maybe the churning
and the weaving
and the death. 

The birthing
and the starving
and the death.

Maybe the churning
of that.

Maybe I’d never been much
for sitting still
when there was malice about,
and there was
so much malice about.

Maybe the soldiers
and the marauders
and our own men
raising their axes,
hacking down the doors
to our softness.

Hauling us
like turnips
sent to market,
bound for the altar
or the convent
or the stake.

Maybe it was a long way
down from the gargoyles
and that wasn’t the way
I wanted to go out.
But maybe I wanted
to go out.

We were all rope-ends
burned down to a single fiber,
and that last one
was starting to curl.

So I began to curl
and curl through the square,
as if spun like a top
from some invisible hand,
as if marking out
a pattern for lace.

And maybe
the marking felt,
at last,
like something
manageable.

Or maybe,
in that lacy membrane
between pleasure
and harm,
the distinction
dissolved altogether.

And maybe when my rope
to this earth burnt through
I kept moving,
beyond my tether’s reach,
beyond the perfect circle
I’d worn around it,
beyond the chain-linked circles
of everyone I knew.

Beyond the Carre d’Or,
where worse kept hovering,
then closing in,
like a fog swallowing
the river islands.

Beyond the pageant wagons
pulled from storage
to be piled with our dead,
and not a single parable
to make it make sense.

As if we weren’t
already spinning.

But maybe, in moving,
I could loosen enough
to move freely.
And maybe the moving
taught me this much:

There is no limit to what
that fog can swallow.
It will devour everything
you love and see and know.

But if we spin fast enough
to spin in time with the churning,
it can feel, for an exquisite moment,
like perfect stillness. 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Heather Hamilton is the author of Here Is a Clearing, which was published by the Poetry Society of America, and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the T.S. Eliot Foundation. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, Smartish Pace, Poetry Northwest, and the Cincinnati Review among other journals.